Traffic shaping is a technique that regulates network data traffic utilizing various mechanisms to shape, rate limit, pace, prioritize or delay a traffic stream determined as less important or less desired than prioritized traffic streams or to enforce a distribution of network resources across equally prioritized packet streams. The mechanisms used to shape traffic include classifiers to match and move packets between different queues based on a policy, queue-specific shaping algorithms to delay, drop or mark packets, and scheduling algorithms to fairly prioritize packet assignment across different queues. Traffic shaping systems employing these mechanisms are difficult to scale when considering requirements to maintain desired network performance for large numbers of traffic classes or when deploying traffic shaping systems in various network host architectures